


High These Fetters Fly

by Phoenixflame88



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Dragon Age Kink Meme, Dragon Age: Inquisition Spoilers, F/M, Friends With Benefits, Gen, Mages and Templars, Original Character(s), Pre-Dragon Age: Inquisition, Spirits, Summoning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-14
Updated: 2015-04-14
Packaged: 2018-03-22 19:47:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3741403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phoenixflame88/pseuds/Phoenixflame88
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lady Trevelyan flees Ostwick's Right of Annulment with a band of mages. With Templars bearing down and their magic spent, they summon a spirit to defend them. They don't count on that spirit being the Dread Wolf.</p>
            </blockquote>





	High These Fetters Fly

“Seven coming—half a mile!” Jan calls from the cave’s edge.   
  
Lorcan swears.   
  
Evelyn Trevelyan looks up from her dirt-crusted nails. Her heart's been hammering her breastbone since the Circle. She's not sure how it hasn't pounded itself bloody.  
  
“We have to do the binding.” Lorcan states.  
  
“ _Wait._ ” Fear sours her mouth and burns in her raw throat. It was a damn stupid idea to sit. She’s unsure she can stand again.  
  
Lorcan looks down, hands buried in his coat. They’d left their robes at Ostwick…no sense in marking themselves from a hundred yards. Plain foolish on her part to think an outfit she’s ridden home in for holidays would be suitable traipsing through the wild.   
  
Evie forces down her voice’s winded hitch. “One mistake and it'd kill us.” Not to mention the most Lorcan’s ever summoned is a Spirit of Compassion, when the Circle’s main spirit healer was too hungover. “We still have some lyrium, and the high ground.”  
  
Fuck everything holy, they’d had a  _lead_  on the Templars. They had a way through the mountain with the old Tevinter tunnel, and time to catch up with Felise’s band. No one imagined the passage already caved in. They’d never thought the only way off this damned hill would be through seven Templars who’ll kill them or drag them back for the Right of Annulment.   
  
“We tried that.” He rakes a hand through his dark hair. “What now, sprinkle snow on them?”  
  
“I didn’t escape just to be a malificar!”   
  
“Then  _help_  me.” He sinks to his knees and grabs her wrists, and when his hands tremble she knows why he’s kept them hidden. The blue-green of his eyes is wire-thin around his pupils. “It’d be a  _spirit_ , not a demon. If we pool our magic, no need for blood.”  
  
He’d cut his chin the same way she’d skinned her elbow, slogging up this fucking mountain...hill...abomination. Evie hadn’t realized how bloody weak she is. Or how exhaustion makes her spells go crooked. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. They’d split up into bands of six or less, to divide the Templars and stay better hidden.  _And you fucking volunteered to stay and break the phylacteries._  
  
“Do it,” Jan croaks, leaning hard on the stone wall. He’d held off a Smite two days ago, but that hadn’t stopped the Templar from breaking his ribs with a shield. “ _Please_.”   
  
_This is a foot toward blood magic, a step away from the Chantry._  Her family’s always stood by the Chantry, even if she cares less for the Maker and mages parts.   
  
“Quarter-mile…” Jan says, looking out again.   
  
_In for copper, in for gold…_  Lorcan’s her friend. Whatever his unruly streak, he grimaces at blood magic the same as she. He stayed with her to break the phylacteries. And even if it isn’t much, he knows the most about summoning.   
  
Evie nods. “I’ll help. But  _Lorcan_ —” she twists her arm free and claps it over his other one. “Find one that wants to help, like you said before. A spirit of Valor, or Justice…don’t give it a reason to want us dead.”  
  
He grins in relief. “I’ll try. Hold me to it?”  
  
_Damn cad._  She closes the distance with a warm kiss. He kisses her back, cupping her cheek, as if to swear he’ll do it right, damn any Templar.  
  
“Oh for fuck’s sake!” Jan shuffles closer, breath wheezing around his pain.  
  
Lorcan helps her up. A trace of excitement has pushed away some fear.  _Stupid boys._  They have minutes to prepare a spell she knows damn well should take hours.  _Stupid, stupid._ But he’s right. She’s a Trevelyan. Her family doesn't shy from honorable deaths, but there’s nothing honorable in being penned like sheep for slaughter. Here, or at the Circle. 

She’s kept a nub of chalk to help focus their runes. Scratching some marks on the dusty ground reminds her just how irresponsible this is. But three exhausted mages against seven angry Templars…that’s just plain stupid.   
  
They gulp half the remaining lyrium. It’s more a summoning squiggle than a summoning circle. The closest she’s come to prayer in eight years is taking the Maker’s name in vain, but she begs anything listening that the spirit isn’t too angry.   
  
Lorcan starts to murmur as Evie takes his hand. Jan heaves himself off the tunnel wall and leans on his staff, taking the mage’s other hand. New sweat’s already trickling down his cheeks.   
  
She hears the clatter-clank of armor. They’d frozen the path earlier, so the Templars’ first attempt had them rolling back to their camp as lightening snapped at their wet armor. It took most of their magic. Only two knights stayed behind, and their fellows pick their way carefully over the wet ground.   
  
Lorcan’s eyes twitch, marking him as in the Fade. He keeps his feet; some mages flop like dead fish. His breath hitches and his clammy hand tightens around hers.  
  
A faint droning crackles in her ears, like dry bones breaking against buried metal. It makes her throat go tight.  _You never had a chance._ In the Circle that sound is softer, more prowling. Now the drone is a sauntering battlesong. A Templar on guard, as close to a Smite as a squeezed crossbow trigger.   
  
Worse is that growing disquiet she’s burning into the dregs of her magic. Every heartbeat she wants to tear away and scrape together one last spell. Go down fighting like one of her ancestors in the Exalted March.   
  
“Evie…” Jan’s deep-brown skin is ashen. Before she can tell him to hold out a moment longer, his legs buckle like a toy soldier.   
  
She can’t talk. Her nails dig into Lorcan as if she can drag some of her magic back. The first of those wing-tipped helms is rising up to the cave mouth, followed by pauldron-heavy shoulders, barely-winded breath, and—  
  
Evie cringes. Not from fear, but the new crackling that burns the cave, sharp and stark as lightening. It sings down her arms, half-disturbing, half-intriguing.  _Aren’t the best things?_  Aunt Osher, the seedy old jenny. That’s when Lorcan sneezes a spatter of blood and slumps against her, making her stagger and shove him upright. The Templar’s bulk swallows the light, sword drawn, a heartbeat away from Smiting them.   
  
It feels like a gathering storm, that drop of pressure that seems to darken the world before the sky splits open. She’s a Trevelyan,  _Modest in temper, bold in—_  
  
Lips spackled in blood, Lorcan drags up his head and smiles at the Templar. Then he giggles.   
  
The darkness fractures into shades of black, the shadows limed in green like gashes in the Veil.  _What in hell did you drag from the Fade?_  
  
He’s too reeling to say. The other thing isn’t. Those shades and shadows sketch a giant creature with a lupine muzzle, fire-flecked eyes, and claws that scrape against stone. The growl rising in its chest echoes off the walls like thunder.  
Lorcan mumbles a word and the black horror erupts. Hooking an arm over her shoulders, he tilts his sweaty temple to hers.   
  
“I  _have_  to see this.” It's a whisper, but thick with desperation.   
  
The Templar’s vanished. Either he jumped or was thrown back. A scream and a crunch have her dragging the mage with her. The cave mouth opens to a narrow slope that zig-zags the mountainside.  
_  
Fuck._

The spirit is shaped like a wolf. It’s on the Templars like a maelstrom. One’s rolling, spurting blood from a stump of a neck. A lady knight lets off a Smite so charged Elia feels the edges tear into her. The wolf flickers, seems to fall between the shadows, before it lunges and slams the knight to the ground. It moves like a wraith, but it’s monstrously real when it rears and crashes onto her breastplate. Evie shivers as claws screech into metal. She can’t hear the crunch of bone beneath, just see the blood sputter from the mouth slit.   
  
Her guts roll. Only a little from horror. She’s queasy with fascination…and relief. This day was always ending in blood. Somehow, it’s not theirs.   
  
The last scream ends in the snap of buried teeth. There’s no feast, only quiet. Apart from the wolf’s slavering breath. Lorcan’s shivering, blood mixing with sweat and trailing pink down his neck. Whatever scrap of sympathy she has for the Templars, he has less. But she sees the same thought in him that’s rising in her.  _We are the apostates they tell the world to fear._  
  
Finally the spirit looks their way. Embers dot its face, blinking like candlelight. No, that’s wrong. The beast has six eyes, though the extra four look like the eyes on peacock feathers.   
  
Lorcan swipes the blood from his nose. Just as the creature lunges at them with the same furor as the Templars.   
  
“You summoned it!” she hisses.   
  
“ _Stop!_ ”   
  
The spirit’s claws screech against shale as it halts close enough she can see the gristle between its teeth. The blood seems to run off its fur like water off a waterfowl. Shadows, almost a dark fog, trail and wreath its legs. This close, the wolf’s almost her height. And far heavier, though it moves with a spectral litheness. For all the days they've spent running in fear, the relief is sadly short-lived.   
  
Lorcan swallows and straightens, moving his arm off her shoulders. “I said the words when I bound it. It won’t hurt us.”  
  
That’s when the realization sinks in and she rounds on him. “It’s a  _demon_.”   
  
The wolf-spirit growls, haunches quivering, like it wants nothing more than to tear them to pieces. She backs away.   
  
“ _No_ ,” he says with a shake of his head. “It didn’t attack me in the Fade. Or try to make a deal. It just… didn’t want to leave.”  
  
“But you said it’s better to find one that wants to help!” Back when he’d first suggested it, days ago, and only Ariella seemed to consider it.  _‘Is bringing a bit of Valor or Justice into the world such a sin?’_  
  
He scoffs in frustration. “We were about to get our heads chopped off! Or worse! I didn’t have time for an extended interview. This—” Lorcan looks at the wolf, jaw clenching. “ _ill-tempered_ spirit was there.”  
  
He looks back in surprise when Jan groans from the floor. Evie forces herself to turn her back on the shadowy beast, kneeling beside the sprawled mage to check his pulse. _Fine._  Taking his cool hand and summoning a whisper of magic, there’s only a hollow flutter in response.  _Drained, dregs and all._  Something her training actually answers is a comfort.  _Just too much exertion._  Nothing to do for it but let him sleep. And find more lyrium. Right now, she doubts she can heat a cup of tea.  
  
Lorcan shuffles past her. He finds Jan’s tossed-aside coat and rolls it up. Sinking down to tuck it under the mage’s head, he looks at her, a weak twist to his mouth. The spirit makes her damn uneasy. But it’s stupid to fight now. Especially when they’re days from the Circle that just declared the Right of Annulment. She leans closer and kisses his cheek.  
  
“We  _would_  be worse than dead.” She offers a small smile. “What with me destroying that bridge, and you being so pretty.”   
  
He snorts. Something eases in his shoulders. He still _dearly_ needs a wet rag for his bloody face though. Evie winces. Most of their supplies were with Gareth, the doe-eyed boy plucked from a blacksmith four years ago. He was strong enough to wrestle a bear. He was also the last across the old bridge, when the Templar’s Smite dropped him into the river. At least then she could take out the bridge and buy them more time to run. Ariella went scouting after that, but most likely the elf was running like an Exalted March was on her tail. 

“He needs ice for his ribs and we all need lyrium,” she says, fighting down her melancholy. “The Templars must’ve camped nearby.”  
  
“They’d have food too.”  _Not to mention a hot bath, fresh clothes, and enough wine to besot a horse._  It’s revolting how filthy they are. “He’ll be out for a while.”   
  
Evelyn picks up the nub of chalk and scratches a note to the sleeping mage, just in case.  
  
The spirit’s left the cave mouth. Stepping into the sun, she feels like a sheep walking out of an abattoir. Then she looks down the slope and damn it she’s stepped into another one. Seven people have that much blood? It’s splattered over stones, sprayed over armor. A handful of crows have already found the headless body. Her mouth goes sour again as she starts to pick her way down.   
  
After ordering the beast to follow them, Lorcan’s looking around with a different kind of shock. He’s also straining his neck to avoid the sun, fingers massaging his temples, the other hand out for balance—  
  
Evie grabs his arm before he goes arse-over-tits and keeps her elbow crooked with his as they descend. She’s heard going downhill is easier than uphill. Fuck that. Her toes are ramming into her boots while her legs ache and burn from the strain.   
  
All the while, the spirit bounds across the mountainside.  _Do spirits get distracted?_ She supposes she was just as agog the first time she was in the Fade. The wolf stops and starts, noses the air and pants, somehow reminding her of her father’s hounds before a thunderstorm.   
  
When they near the bottom, a short way from a grove of oak trees and bracken, she learns a spirit can damn well be distracted.   
  
A faint hiss and something streaks by. For a moment she thinks it’s a bird. But the spirit rounds on the grove, and she sees the crossbow bolt jutting from its shoulder. A scraping,  _irritated_ growl and the creature plunges for the trees.   
  
Lorcan’s breathing hard. They both are. He finally shrugs.  
  
“Guess we found the camp.” 


End file.
